Which sounds sensible on the surface, until you realize that all military organizations have extensive experience with that exact question, and have spent centuries refining their practices. Deferring that to a private company is actually a major regression and a concerning role to pass on to the public regardless.
FWIW I am not pro military, but it's a prominent part of human culture and not going away anytime soon. I do understand the nature of professions, however, and only one of these groups has made the interpretation of this question their specialization.
I don’t remember the last war that didn’t have credible evidence of war crimes occurring. Were bombing civilian infrastructure in Iran, Iraq had Abu Ghraib among all the Collateral Damage stuff, the Highway of Death in the Gulf was probably a war crime, Vietnam had My Lai, WWII was the advent of carpet bombing civilian infrastructure. I can’t think of any for Korea, but I also know very little so that doesn’t say much.
We still haven’t charged anyone for the second strike on that fishing boat in South America, and I haven’t heard a single rationale for why that’s not a war crime other than “fog of war”.
The US doesn’t even really have a meaningful system for finding and prosecuting these, because we aren’t signatories for the ICC and have a bill saying we’ll invade if they charge one of our service members with a war crime. We aren’t basically the furthest thing from having any experience prosecuting war crimes. I can probably count on my fingers the number of cases we’ve tried. We rarely charge our own service members, and we usually kill foreign combatants rather than capture and charge them.
War includes death by design. The trajectory is trending toward less unjustified death.
This is not at all what happened. The existing contract that Anthropic had with the government had two red lines: No autonomous weapons (i.e., do not build Skynet with Claude), and no mass domestic surveillance.
Anthropic did not, and does not want, any case-by-case veto power over the US Military's use of their AI models. The red lines were negotiated ahead of time.
That kind of extensive experience.
Anthropic did the morally right thing and are being punished for it. The case in point justifies their position.
As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.
I guess my opinion would really depend on the exact wording and details of the arrangement. Lots of people jumping in with strong stances based on pretty limited details.
The whole conflict is specifically about uses that do not involve a human decision. The DoD agreed to a contract that said it wouldn't use Anthropic for that, and then tried to change the terms.
Incidentally, the DoD used Claude in its decision that resulted in killing 120 children at an elementary school for girls. The Pentagon concluded that there was human review (which would mean that it fell within the contract's terms) but that the review was hollowed out (which could mean that it was a violation of the contract).
This is false. Anthropic wanted assurance that its technology would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance.
It's about them maintaining an interpretation of law at all.
Simpletons read that as: "The DOW wants to kill people with AI."
https://www.pearlcohen.com/anthropic-sues-department-of-defe...
The DoW actually used AI in the Iran war, which led to them attacking a school and killing more than a hundred childrem. That's exactly what Anthropic wanted them to prevent. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-iran-school-attack/
None of those systems pull the trigger. They assemble data for human review.
The core dispute was the US Military deciding it needed to renegotiate this contract, but without Anthropic's two red lines: No fully autonomous weapons (i.e., zero humans in the loop), and no mass domestic surveillance.
It's not like Anthropic will be nationalized any more than the bankrupted auto companies of 2008.
For example, if you think Party A and its customers are infringing your patent, you can threaten to sue the customers unless they use your product instead. That’s not tortious interference because suing someone for patent infringement isn’t itself wrongful.
They absolutely did. If a product is designated a supply chain risk, no one is allowed to use it anywhere in the DoD's supply chain.
It is impossible to miss the absolute hypocrisy of this moment and how people and corporations are supposedly free, but if you happen to be of interest to the government they will try to casually ruin you. It has always been this way, people just haven't noticed because it flies under the radar most of the time when the govern crushes some smaller enterprise or another because it got in their way or didn't play by their rules.
It seems simple to me. Anthropic is a private company. If you don't like it fix the laws or don't buy from them.
Yeah, the DOD is such a huge purchaser that it can "ruin you" by blacklisting you if you don't play by its terms. The same is true about Walmart if you're a grocery supplier, Apple if you make electronics components, etc. Private companies absolutely exercise their power like that.
We've forgotten what it means to run a society, we're allowed to change rules how we see fit whenever we want to. Only the elites exercise this power, but people have it too.
In theory, maybe. In reality, this is a privilege for a very small number of rich people.
> Anything that erodes the rights of companies erodes your rights.
How absurd. Food safety regulations don't erode my rights one bit, but they do erode the rights of companies to negligently poison me. I guess I'm losing the right to start a food company that poisons people, but I'm happy to forfeit that right in exchange for not being poisoned. We could extend this list of reasonable tradeoffs in which we all exchange the right to treat people poorly for the right not be treated poorly, and we all would benefit.
Except the people who want to sell poisoned food, those people will be worse off. I am okay with that.
Also what private property? Most Americans can't afford to buy homes and are being priced out of owning property entirely.
Corporations have eroded the livelihood of Americans more than the government ever has.
There is only one class that fights against raising the minimum wage, or establishing a 32 hour workweek, or enacting medicare for all, or providing a society free of pollution and it's always been the corporate class.
There has been no dominating force that has killed more American civilians than the American corporation.
Corporations can't even regulate themselves and you're trying to argue that the true enemy is a democratic government? Come on man. These types of retorts does not convince voters (so please continue saying them). Actually go out there and do some deep canvassing.
People rightfully hate corporations because they are the last vestige of monarchs, oligarchies, and authoritarians that are allowed to ruin + destroy our lives with little repercussions.
One just has to look at the situation of our deteriorating food safety inspections (that were hallowed out by Musk + DOGE goons FYI) to know that corporations absolutely do not care about public safety over profits. Or health insurance companies that are incentivized to deny Americans life saving care for shareholder profits.
We have a sick society and it's mostly due to the unabashed influence of corporations over our lives.
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Also in other comments you seem to be under the impression that corporations should be legally allowed to do what they want with zero government interference? Why do you believe such things over concepts of democracy or regulation?
Society is allowed to tell someone no, not everyone consents to your beleifs.
Regarding housing crisis, its the "small people" who cause this. I don't know of any large corporation that is NIMBY. If I had it, I'd steamroll NIMBY's houses and declare them a blight, they should agree with it since they regularly call various constructions blights. Places that tries building more housing saw reductions in prices. Its not the fault of corporations if people don't want houses built.
You can only say corporations "killed" people in abstract ways, governments not only have the legal power to but have routinely murdered millions very directly and physically.
Even if you believed corporations are authoritarian, its still better to have competing sources of power, not all corporations will always align with the government so it is better for powerful opposition to exist if government turns shit.
You also mentioned monarchs in your list, fascist italy is a direct example in my favor, the king's ego and his own self interest in his power caused him to continually give friction to Mussolini thus weakening the dictator.
Yes. Paragraph #1, sentence #1 of the US Constitution: "provide for the common defence[sic]". This is further elaborated upon in other original Constitution articles and subsequent amendments.
From that, we derive a long, storied history of things, among the more recent of which, and the operative matter here, is the Defense Production Act circa 1950.
The US is fundamentally based on the obligation of mutual military defense, and delegates the authority to call military balls and strikes, such as who will and will not be permitted to contract with the US military, exclusively to POTUS. Anthropic et al. are way out of their depth when they imagine their "terms and conditions" imbue them with some sort of military veto power in the US. Trump's action here, given his nature, is actually moderate: he could take this much further if he wishes.
Anthropic’s position is also known as “having terms of service”.
To be clear the existing, signed ToS terms that Trump balked at were:
1. No mass surveillance of US civilians - illegal but we have all read the Snowden papers.
2. Fully unmanned kill chains on autonomous weapons - Anthropic have even stated they will support this eventually, they just didn’t think their models were ready and didn’t want the obvious, inevitable blowback.
The DoD is within its rights to cancel the contract if it doesn’t like the terms that it previously signed.
This seems like a definitional supply chain risk.
This whole fiasco is happening because the defense dept wanted to use anthropic models in a way not allowed in the existing contract. Anthropic stuck to the contract, and the def dept tried to be punitive about it.
If they can’t get what they want from the seller, fine go to a different seller, but the supply chain risk is just government overreach.
AWS GovCloud I believe promises the opposite. They could still do it, in terms of the capability itself, but then they'd be subject to both civil, criminal, and possibly even military consequences. Whereas Anthropic would be shielded from those consequences by the terms of their agreement (presumably; I'm not up to speed on the specifics of their contractual demands. This is just based on the context from this article and the previous appeals case that ruled against the government).
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/01/claude-codes...
> FASCSA definition (41 U.S.C. § 4713(k)(6)): "Supply chain risk" means the risk that any person may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, extract data, or otherwise manipulate the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, maintenance, disposition, or retirement of covered articles so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise manipulate the function, use, or operation of the covered articles or information stored or transmitted on the covered articles.
This topic is a mind-killer, lots of uninformed opinion swamping the news, and it's hard to get actual signal on the technical questions at hand. (And, I think it's naive to believe that the government is actually concerned about the precise legal definitions; remember Hegseth decreed that no government sub-contractors would be allowed to transact with Anthropic, despite there being no legal basis for this?)
> Anthropic can decide at any point to disable the military's ability
If you're referring to the claims of a killswitch, Anthropic testified under oath that they don't have one. This has been thoroughly covered, e.g. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/22/anthropic-no-kill-switch-ai.... Anthropic provides the weights, they get run in DoD's secure enclave. There's no "phone home".
If you mean more generally, that DoD might breach a contract and then have that contract cancelled going forwards, then yes - this is literally how all SaaS contracts work. And it's very clearly not what the quoted text above refers to.
The way this works in a non-totalitarian country is, the government says "I want new terms and you won't give them to me; instead I will take my business elsewhere". And indeed this is what happened, DoD now has contracts with Google and OpenAI for equivalent capabilities.
Just to engage on your terms, with the actual concern you're raising; I would say rather than "FASCSA supply chain risk" a better way of thinking about it is "vendor lock-in". DoD absolutely should not rely on a single vendor for these kinds of capabilities. And most defense spending explicitly contemplates this already. This should be and has been solved through basic procurement practices.
If what you're saying is true, then there is truly no supply chain risk other than the risk of civil action against the government for violation of terms of service. That seems like a rather weak point on which to balance a "supply chain" risk though.
The TL;DR is that this was actually decided on the principle that Anthropic can “manipulate” the defense systems by training Claude to refuse to take certain actions.
This feels like a parallel construction to me, it wasn’t reported AFAICT at the time of the original drama.
But yeah, the decision in OP has nothing to do with the contractual terms that everyone has been debating upthread.
And it also doesn't mean that Anthropic is a supply chain risk merely for not wanting AI to be the active decision maker in live or death situations in war.
And Anthropic's objection was recently confirmed: the US military blew up a school in Iran due to an AI error, and killed more than a hundred kids.
No, it does not mean that. I don't know why people have been making this claim. If you work for a company, let's call it X, and your work is not DOD related, let's say you work on a social media service, then X has no reason (from this designation) to prevent you from using Anthropic, it will not impact their defense contracts at all.
This designation means Athropic's systems can't be used in DOD work, but many companies that work with the DOD also do work outside that. That separate work is not restricted with respect to the use of Anthropic's systems. Repeating a lie as if it were true is just dumb, it helps spread that lie.
Or these companies have to completely split the govcloud work from its commercial offerings (which defeats the whole point).
Now you're making changes to the source code used in govcloud using claude, a clear supply chain violation.
It's a very wishy-washy area right now, and the branches are all struggling to figure out how to work around these laws that were mostly intended to keep jobs in the USA but are now hampering productivity. One example is that DoD contractors can't use open source software that has a non-us developer as a core maintainer. Obviously that's extremely hard to track and it's mostly ignored. Pete definitely bit off more than he realized in his effort to seem cool and get what he wanted.
In practice, I think it's fair to say there's an informal understanding that AWS will not be punished for this so long as they stay in the regime's good graces. But that's how fascist power accumulation works; now they have to stay in the regime's good graces, or they risk being destroyed.
If you don't like that, and would prefer to discuss a lawful supply chain risk designation, you should convince him to retract the statements or impeach him.
You're crediting him with much more power than he has, and somehow you think I'm sane washing by calling a lie a lie. What you're doing is far worse, you're believing his lies.
Anyways, the statement is false, at least the extent to which being designated a supply chain risk can impact who does business with Anthropic. There's no need for him to retract it or even to impeach him over it, because any company with a lawyer and a reasonable separation of their commercial and defense work will be able to determine that they can still do business with Anthropic despite the designation. It'll just have to be confined, so long as the designation stands, to their commercial work.
I suppose you would have us believe that, therefore, we are not at war with Iran?
Just because his statement has no legal basis does not mean that it is unreasonable to believe it will be enforced as-stated.
Indeed, this insistence on prioritizing the written law over the empirical reality borders on the delusional - if concentration camps were not the official policy of Nazi Germany, would you also insist we are making some mistake by "believing the lies" about their existence?
I just don't get what sort of point you're trying to make here - do you really think that the current US government cannot possibly cause problems for people that violate their unofficial edicts?
Do you really think a sensible legal department is going to advise their clients to antagonize the administration by using Claude for their "unrelated" commercial work?
Well, that was attempted...
So yes obviously defense contractors are forbidden to use it.
Probably not, no private company has the ability to tell all its suppliers "thou shalt not do business with <some other company>". They lack the pull to compel them to do so. The closest would be things like what MS did back in the 90s, and got them in hot water with the anti-trust case against them.
Do you seriously think that you can go to all your vendors (if you were a business owner) and tell them, "You can't use Atlassian when working on anything you sell us." How will your business actually compel all those vendors to drop their use of Atlassian for that work? How will you verify compliance and why should any of them sign a contract with you with these restriction? And if they do, how will you avoid anti-trust violations because almost certainly the only way you could talk them into signing such a contract would be to be a massive company throwing your weight around (like MS did with hardware OEMs back in the 90s, among other things).
The reasons why are incidental to that requirement for defense contractors.
What are you talking about? That's nowhere close to a true statement.
Anthropic did not host the model that the Department of War used. It had, and still has no control over the models it has deployed in classified environments.
Side note, the Anthropic bots are astroturfing the comments.
if this is more than "people i disagree with are commenting", you should be messaging hn@ycombinator.com rather than writing it as a side note in your comment.
by analogy it would be like the us military renting all m4 carbines from a political party.
anthropic treat customers very badly. they have claude lecture the user about the moral law according to anthropic. they change the product all the time. they have safety refusals to degrade functionality, they have mandatory logging so they spy on how it is used.
it's unusable for a serious application.
on top of that it is unsurprising that a big tyrant does not take well to a little tyrant.
fable 5.1 doesn't have any option to stop anthropic spying on it. you can't have that...anthropic contractors and actually the rationalist ea clowns themselves don't have security clearance
not even AWS govcloud can offer fable without anthropic snooping. it is the only model with this problem.
the pentagon can't force suppliers to require no snooping policies unless they designate the company a risk.
other than those suppliers who are already working on classified projects and can't have dario write an essay on his blog about 'pace the f35' or 'missiles of loving grace. the adolescence of classified satellites.'
it is a supply chain risk, so they don't want it in the supply chain.
that's logical.
Anthropic doesn't provide model w/o guardrails, suppliers have to use public version, newer model releases surely know about Anthropic standoff with the military.. how to prevent model from realizing that it's doing something for the military (supplier) and sandbagging and/or subtly sabotaging the results?
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DOD recommends sandbagging as defense mechanism against destination "attacks":
https://media.defense.gov/2026/Sep/08/2003992823/-1/-1/1/CSA...
Page 13
When suspecting a malicious distillation campaign, consider varying changes to responses across requests to complicate response quality evaluations, such that the subtle changes avoid triggering obvious alerts. Reducing reasoning depth, presenting correct information with different reasoning, or stylistic inconsistencies may evade detection while reducing training usefulness.
Avoid informing China-based AI company users suspected of distillation campaigns of a switch to a downgraded model. Informing malicious distillers would enable them to improve their defense evasions and indicate when to roll back training.
they don't want suppliers to use it because it is a supply chain risk. specifically, the risk is that it is unreliable.
the designation stops suppliers from using it.
it stops it from being in the supply chain.
If Lockheed Martin disabled weapons systems when it discovered the Air Force using its fighters over Iranian airspace based on Lockheed's ideological views, I'm pretty sure they would be labeled a supply chain risk at minimum. What is the issue here?
anthropic nanny claude and spy on it, they have ego issues.
if the dod use anthropic it is sort of like putin relying on prigozhin.
prigozhin got ideas and tried to usurp putin. this did not end well for prigozhin.
To me a fascist government would prevent people from being able to take their power away at all, and simply do whatever they want with impunity, but I don't quite see that happening in the US right now. Courts are still ruling against the government, they're largely complying in most ways, and there will still be more elections.
Are they trying to do some things that smell "fashy"? Maybe. But I still think it's a stretch to say the US government is full blown fascist in the same way we've seen that in the past in some other countries.